With traditional SDLC, you have to explain everything to your project managers and ask permission to deploy what you need when necessary. With DevOps, you are able to make decisions at the right time and plan to deploy the system at the right moment. Formerly extremely siloed departments can now talk to each other without a long time-lag between one part of the organization and the next.
DevOps has become the gold standard in modern IT, but it means different things to different people. What exactly is DevOps, and why has the demand for it increased so fast? DevOps is a collaboration between development and operation teams, which enables continuous delivery of applications and services to our end users. Let’s go over DevOps fundamentals, understand why DevOps, and some of the tools why DevOps engineers are using today.
It allows developers to frequently merge code changes into a central repository where builds and tests are executed. This helps DevOps teams address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates. By integrating security into a continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipeline, DevSecOps is an active, integrated part of the development process. Security is built into the product by integrating active security audits and security testing into agile development and DevOps workflows. DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability. A DevOps toolchain helps teams tackle important DevOps fundamentals including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.
Critical security issues are dealt with as they become apparent, not after a threat or compromise has occurred. Managing runtime errors can be much more challenging for development teams as they can find their way into a public release without being noticed during the debugging phase. Such runtime errors are seldom caused by bad code and mostly relate to the operating system or architecture on which you are attempting to run the code. This makes it difficult to predict them without comprehensive pre-release testing of your software. A CI/CD tool can help by performing an in-depth runtime analysis of your project, testing all functionalities across multiple OS and architectures, to ensure no bugs are shipped with your final release.
By increasing the frequency and velocity of releases, DevOps teams improve products rapidly. A competitive advantage can be gained by quickly releasing new features and repairing bugs. Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality. Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep services on. It offers excellent support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative and powerful workflows and tools for the development build process.
For DevOps to succeed, these barriers must be eliminated by adopting the "you build it, you run it" practice. This doesn’t mean there aren’t people or teams who specialize, only that the lines of communication and collaboration between teams are open and used. Another DevOps study, DORA’s State of DevOps 2019, found that elite practitioners importance of devops release 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams.
It is an agile process that increases the flexibility and reliability of your solutions. DevOps practices emphasize the orchestration of a team's efforts while maintaining the integrity of the development environment. So, a team will be able to maintain a great experience for users while making updates and changes to a product. Continuous delivery expands upon continuous integration by automatically deploying code changes to a testing/production environment. It follows a continuous delivery pipeline, where automated builds, tests, and deployments are orchestrated as one release workflow.
Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product. DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams break work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value. DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.
Speed application development, improve software quality, reduce business risk, and shrink costs. Focus on the people and processes as you start your DevOps transformation, and incorporate advanced tooling, integration, and feature functionality as you become a mature team. Be sure to check out our DevOps tutorials for automation, testing, security, observability, feature flagging, and continuous delivery. DevOps values are sometimes applied to teams other than development. When security teams adopt a DevOps approach, security is an active and integrated part of the development process.